My own experience as a Columbia University student radical under arrest took place in late April 1968 in the course of a massive campus uprising. The uprising was led, or at least initiated, by a radical social-democratic organization called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, together with the Student Afro-American Society, or SAS. And, since I was a stalwart of SDS, I spent a week camping out in the university president’s office and elsewhere, too, which I regarded as an exercise in insurrectionary citizenship. The authorities preferred to regard it as “criminal trespass.”

So I passed the night in the dismal Manhattan jail known as the Tombs, in the dankest of cells with a morose group of other criminal trespassers, among the nearly 700 of us who had been rounded up for arrest by the New York Police Department. And in the morning, when I returned to my campus dormitory, I discovered a further residue of the police raid, beyond the mass arrests, which consisted of large dark bloodstains coagulated on the walkway.

Those were large experiences, the bloodstains especially. And today those experiences cause me to observe Columbia’s new student rebellion through a lens of curious and strange emotions — amused at first, almost happy in a paternal spirit, for a deluded half-minute, and then, half a minute later, horrified, first on a simple level, in solidarity with Columbia’s harassed Jewish students, then on a deeper level.

Sympathetic adults used to say to us student radicals in 1968, “I agree with your ends but not with your means.” By this they meant to applaud our lofty ideals and to deplore our raucous and too-raucous riots and mayhem. But these days, I discover that my own views have taken an opposite turn. The raucous aspect of student protests seems to me only a secondary problem even now.

The students want to take over the lawn? It would not be so terrible, if some of them did not insist on persecuting Jews. But I recoil at what are plainly the ends.

In the weeks after my return to the Columbia campus from the Tombs, back in 1968, I raced around the quads helping to foment our mighty student strike. And, as I did so, one professor after another accosted me on the brick walkways to harangue me with lectures about politics and the past. Robert Gorham Davis, the respected literary critic, upbraided me repeatedly, and so did David Sidorsky, my philosophy professor, such that, after a while, I realized that I was in extended debate with those distinguished people. It turned out to be a debate about Germany in the 1930s.

The professors were haunted by Germany and its history, which might seem odd in the context of a student strike in 1968 in New York. But nothing was odd. In 1968, the defeat of the Nazis was only 23 years behind us, and the era of World War II and the catastrophe of the Jews had not yet definitively disappeared into the past — at least, not in the professors’ eyes. They wanted me to understand that Germany’s leftists in the 1930s had failed to understand Nazism’s danger. Foolish left-wing radicalism had helped undermine the German universities, which ought to have been a place of anti-Nazi resistance. They wanted me to understand, all in all, that what people think they are doing might not be what they are actually doing, and, in the name of high ideals, society might be weakened, and the worst of disasters might be brought about.

Today a memory of those walkway debates floods back on me because, in my own eyes, it has become impossible to mistake that, historically speaking, the era of World War II and the catastrophes of those times have still not come to an end. And in my eyes, it is impossible to mistake that, among the student radicals, things have taken a wrong turn.

The students — the students of today, the best of them — will defend themselves by explaining that, if they are occupying Columbia’s South Lawn and chanting and drumming, it is because extremist Israeli settlers are oppressing the West Bank Palestinians, which is a right and worthy point to raise. The students will emphasize that, in launching its riposte in Gaza, Israel’s army has ended up killing immense numbers of civilians, which is also incontestable. And the Israeli effort to crush Hamas has ended up imposing famine-like conditions and one dreadful thing after another, all of which is true and horrific and enraging.

And yet it has to be acknowledged that ultimately the central issue in the war is Hamas and its goal, which has lately seemed more realistic than anyone among Israel’s friends has imagined in recent years. The goal is and has always been the eradication of the Israeli state. And the radical students at Columbia, even if not all of them, have shown that, at some level, if not at every level, they understand and embrace the goal.

I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

My experience as a student (and, briefly, political prisoner!) back in 1968 qualifies me, I think, to offer a constructive observation to Columbia’s administration. Minouche Shafik, the university president, has clamped down on more than 100 student radicals. In her congressional testimony, she explained that two of the more extreme professors have been rebuked (“spoken to”), and a third “will never teach at Columbia again,” as if dealing with three professors and the unruly students would solve the problem. But I worry about this.

If I were the autocratic overlord of Columbia University, I would be generous, despite everything, to the student radicals, even if they horrify me. How could I be otherwise, considering that, more than a half-century ago, I myself was not without what might be called moments of excess? I would amnesty the whole lot of them, except for anyone who seems genuinely a menace.

But I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors — not just the handful who sound crazy, but the professors who sound reasonable. These are the professors who have created a disastrous climate of opinion at Columbia. They are the professors who maintain that Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre could plausibly be regarded as (I quote a statement by well more than 100 Columbia professors, some of them very brilliant people, a mere three weeks after the massacre) “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies.” Or the massacre could be regarded “as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.”

I would turn on those professors out of a belief that, at Columbia, appalling chants and occasional hints of violence from students on a tear are not ultimately the problem. Intellectual degeneration is the problem. Otherwise, the existential attacks on Jews, euphemistically advocated, would not be under discussion. I would turn in anger on the professors out of a belief, in short, that a university ought to be a place of resistance to the worst of ideas, and not a place of acquiescence.

That was my own lesson from 1968, hammered into me by thoughtful professors who remembered the 1930s, which I offer back to the Columbia administrators and the more levelheaded professors in 2024 exactly as I would if I myself were on the faculty right now, and I had run into bright and beloved students on the redbrick walks who had gone out of their minds, as students sometimes do.